Chapel Hill community, council members respond to Town's removal of DEI content from website

Former Chapel Hill Mayor Mark Kleinschmidt said he had never felt more disappointed in Chapel Hill than when he learned a page honoring him as Chapel Hill’s first openly gay mayor was removed from the Town website. 

The site, which celebrated his and other members of the LGBTQ+ community’s contribution to Chapel Hill’s history, was one of 17 sites taken down in a recent website content audit. Other pages removed from the Town website included DEI Resolutions and Ordinances, LGBTQ+ Employee Resource Group and Racial Equity.

The Town restored the sites on March 20.

In an email to the mayor and Town Council, Interim Town Manager Mary Jane Nirdlinger said the sites were removed as a part of the Town’s new, user-friendly website project. 

According to her email, the website vendor and an independent contractor recommended pages with low views be removed to improve the lifespan of the current site and help the Town better design a new site. All 17 pages each had less than 500 page views over a 12-month period, according to the results of the audit. 

Community member Margot Lester, a longtime marketing consultant, said she has worked on similar website redesigning projects. She said it is common practice to consider removing low-traffic pages when redesigning a website; however, a site being low-traffic does not mean it should automatically be removed. 

“You can look at that and say it's not getting traffic, but if it has value to the organization or, in this case, the Town's history, or it matters to a core constituency or group of stakeholders, or it's just important, you keep that,” Lester said. “You also have to factor in current events and current sentiments.” 

Kleinschmidt, who was mayor from 2009 to 2015, said he messaged a couple town council members as soon as he heard that the sites had been removed. The following week, he posted a statement on his Facebook condemning the action and encouraging community members to email the mayor and Town Council. 

“The true reputational impact of this is that this action feeds the growing narrative that Chapel Hill doesn’t really stand for anything anymore,” he wrote. “And that’s deeply saddening.”

Mayor Jess Anderson said upon learning the sites had been taken down, she and other town council members requested the pages be put back up. 

Kleinschmidt said he does not believe the explanation that low site traffic was the only reason these sites were removed. 

“There are literally hundreds, if not thousands of pages on the Chapel Hill town website,” he said. “Seventeen of them are taken down, and the idea that those 17 would suddenly make the website more user-friendly — it just doesn't make any sense.”

He said he believes the action was either simply a tone-deaf decision, or a preemptive reaction to changes at the federal level — a stance he included in his initial Facebook post. Erasing LGBTQ+ people from the Town website does not help the Town receive grants, he said, but rather helps people who want to erase LGBTQ+ from the community do it more easily.

Kleinschmidt’s post garnered a total of 96 comments expressing concern over the Town’s decision. Kate Shipman, a community member who commented on the post, said she found the decision ignorant. 

“One of the things I love about Chapel Hill is how accepting it is of all minorities, whether it's sexual or racial or religious or whatever,” she said. “So seeing that taken out of play was just really heartbreaking for me.”

Anderson said she appreciated the community coming forward with their concerns. 

“I really don't think there was any intentional effort to hide those pages, I think it's just making sure that we're being careful and thoughtful about the messages we're sending,” she said. “And, also, it was great that people quickly spoke up and said, ‘This is the message you're sending — is that what you want to be doing?’ And we said, resoundingly, 'No'.”

@sarahhclements

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